Flickr Images

Awesome Flickr

Flickr Images

About

Tuesday, 17 November 2015

Starcraft Survives Fallout 4, Rise of The Tomb Raider Falls

Thanks to Bethesda's immensely anticipated title Fallout 4 dropping like an atomic bomb on store shelves, everywhere, it's easy to forget the other releases that came out on the same day...one of which did better than the other. Fallout 4 was undoubtedly a success, with sales that are over 200% higher than Fallout: New Vegas, the previous game in the series, in terms of UK sales (of which I contributed to). But what of the other games?
First off was Rise of The Tomb Raider. Poor Lara. First she was stuck on an island and even while under the name of a well established franchise, it only sold less than 63,000 copies in the UK in the entirety of its first week. The console it stuck its guns to didn't seem to have much luck either, with more Fallout 4 copies still being sold on the PS4 rather than the Xbox One.

It doesn't look like a bad game by any stretch of the imagination however; its graphics look very good, and the gameplay and story are reminiscent of a much more serious Uncharted. November is generally just a bad place to release games that don't have massive footholds in the industry, and Tomb Raider just could not compete - especially this year where powerhouses like Fallout 4, Battlefront, Halo 5 and of course the yearly Call Of Duty are snatching money out of people's wallets, leaving barely anything to be spent on anything else.

Tomb Raider shouldn't lose all hope for the time being. It is just a timed Xbox exclusive, meaning that the PS4 and PC releases are yet to come out. Hopefully when those editions arrive, they won't have as much competition, and seeing as they are also a lot more popular than the system they chose to provide exclusivity to, I'm sure there will be more sales to come.

But what of Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void? Well, considering that you've probably read the title, it did in fact survive the onsalught of sales Fallout has taken for itself. Blizzard made a mysterious tweet saying that "over 1 million warped in" days after launch, which suggests that it sold 1 million copies, which is substantially more than the other game released that day.

While selling less units than the previous 2, it still keeps up, with Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty (the first one) selling 1.5 million in 48 hours, and Heart of the Swarm (the second one) selling 1.1 million in the same mount of time. They can probably owe this to their dedicated fanbase, which Tomb Raider doesn't necessarily have a large amount of (especially considering their siding with Xbox).

It is predicted to outpace Heart of the Swarm soon, and Blizzard's new fast paced team shooter Overwatch is set to release in Spring, so we'll get to see how well this did in comparison to that.

At least more than one game made it out of last week alive.

PS. Sorry for not writing in a while, lots of school related things to do, same with Sam and Joe too